“Just make it simple!” It’s what many of us do for a living. But what design rules are there to help direct the path to simple.
There are some crude ones. “Everything on a site should be just 3 clicks away” has been around for a while, and has recently been given a Telstra make-over as “One Click”.
Steve Krug, in his wonderful book “Don’t Make Me Think!”, refutes this simplistic rule of thumb, saying that users would prefer 5 or more super simple and obvious clicks rather than 3 clicks that each take a whole lot of thinking. Sure, all things being equal, reduce the clicks, but not at the cost of added thinking and complexity (aka “cognitive load”).
John Gruber, of the insightful Mac site Daring Fireball, recently posted Deal with it, in which he echoes and expands Tantek Celik’s statement that, all things being equal, less user interface controls means a simpler interface.
His refinement goes like this: It isn’t so much the number of controls, but how many “things” on an interface you have to “deal with” to get your task done. Again, it’s about cognitive load. Don’t make me think. It’s not just keystokes or fields.
His example is the event entering interface of Mac OS X’s iCal (think: lots of separate fields for every element) and 37signals’s Backpack (a single type-anything-and-we’ll-work-it-out-for-you field).
He hints at it in his article, but one thing we have to be mindful of is the trade-offs between Efficiency and Learnability. For a commonly-used productivity application like a calendar program, you turn up the dial on efficiency and provide ways for a newbie to progress to competent intermediate as fast as possible.
(You can go too far on the single entry field, of course. You can solve world hunger and peace if you know the right words and symbols to type into a Google search field. Most of its extended use has almost zero learnability.)
But it’s a bit tricker with our websites - it’s more of a balancing act. Demote learnability too much and you’ve lost the newbies. Spell out everything every time, and your familiar user starts puckering up to the single field simplicity of a Google map. Would I rather spell out every field individually, or just type in “bunnings fitzroy” into a single field on White Pages and have it find the closest one to me (with an option to disambiguate and remember which Fitzroy I was actually meaning on the results pages)?
But back to “Deal with it”. Count how many things you are asking a user to deal with to complete their task. And how hard is it to deal with each one - how much thinking’s involved? What’s the room for error? And have we consciously made the trade-off between learnability and efficiency that’s appropriate for the situation?
If only simple was easy!
